This episode reviews the course and invites you to make a plan to integrate creativity into your life. Creativity is a means of spiritual development as it helps us reconnect with our playful inner child and our aged inner sage. It also helps us step back from the world and enter into a process of light-hearted self-reflection. The result is a greater understanding of the day-to-day meaning of our lives. We learn as meditators that this is just as important to look at as the big picture meaning. So in this episode I share my experience as someone who finds time everyday for creative expression, despite having a demanding job and a family! 

Here are the take-aways from this course: 

Creativity requires careful observation. We make meaning out of what we observe, and for many of us making meaning helps us better understand, or at least accept, suffering. 
Creativity requires a balance of mindfulness and mind wandering. Imagination hits me in the evening, or on a bus, and I feel compelled to follow it, like the sound of sea lions on a coastal hike. Other times, I need to meditate to quiet my mind and clarify my creative direction.  
Creativity is empowering. My guest Becky had been through a lot in life and creativity gave her the confidence to keep moving forward and the awareness that she deeply enjoys artistic expression.
Creativity is healing. Poetry helps me connect my feelings around loss, even though it does so indirectly. Our minds are machines, they are works of art and we should respect them as such. 
The creative process is a messy but it commonly involves opening up to a flow, being in a non-critical state, and being playful. It also requires looking at what you’ve already created and assembling it in different ways. 
Creative people are more sensitive to inner and outer worlds. Such sensitivity can lead to really insightful art, but we can also be more adversely affected by the world and by our thoughts. We need to be aware of this and find appropriate ways to express it. 
We need to share our creativity! Sharing your art is an important part of the creative process, as feedback helps us grow. Sharing is cathartic for you, and artistic expression heals others who will have unique interpretations of your work.

Episode 10: Course review and Personal Action Plan

In this episode, we look at the role of mindfulness in managing emotions that creative people experience. Being more creative goes hand-in-hand with being more sensitive to inner and outer worlds. This sensitivity can make people feel emotions intensely, and in order to manage such emotions people may discard creative expression altogether. Instead of hiding the pain from ones’ personality, people can learn to decrease or eliminate the pain through mindfulness practice, which ultimately allows us to meet our maximum creative potential. A good example from this episode is discussing with a friend his experience solo camping. In the middle of the night, he awoke and all the day-to-day anxieties flooded his mind. He said the distractions were all removed so this all happened at once. As we become more sensitive to life, we need to find ways to manage more intense feelings. Mindfulness helps by being with the feelings, like sitting with a friend with a hand on their back when they are feeling overwhelmed.

Episode 9: Sensitive artist types need mindfulness

This episode looks at a fundamental question for creative people: what is the balance between artistic integrity and producing work that people can relate to? As you embark on a new creative adventure you may begin to wonder if you’ll share your work with others. What can people learn from you? Are you really saying anything knew? All artists struggle with these questions, even if they aren’t saying anything at all (I tell my stories with instrumental pieces). Julia Cameron, writer of the artist was has a saying “you focus on quality and let your higher power focus on quality.” This could misinterpreted as just producing lots of poor quality work and expecting the universe to fix it up somehow. But what she means is to not take that inner critic so seriously. Notice, in a mindful state, what core beliefs drive the inner critic and try to smile. Recognize when the inner critic is helpful and when it isn’t.

Episode 8: Sharing your Creative Work

This episode continues a discussion on the creative process, with a good friend and fellow musician. Here we discuss simple ways to stimulate the creative process. Sometimes embarking on a creative project, no matter how small, feels like a lot of work. But fitting in some creativity everyday does not have to be a chore. Some days all you need is a 10 minute activity where you just select words from various poems to make your own poem. You could also write lyrics to a song by piecing together stanzas or lines from things you’ve written in the past, instead of writing from scratch. This episode also touches on the idea that we perceive our own creative work differently throughout our lives. What you wrote a decade ago could have more relevance now than it did then! So keep all your work!

Episode 7: Finding easy ways to be creative every day

This episode demonstrates one type of creative process, where I share the way I approach songwriting, illustrating with one of my recent songs. Those who appreciate music see the importance of tension and resolve. Tension and resolve are also fundamental aspects of the human experience, as life is full of sources of tension, most which find their resolution. The better we can observe these aspects of tension and resolve in life, the more inspired we can be to create. The song I play in this episode came in a time of resolve, after grieving the loss of my brother for months. It tries to communicate the gratitude which I have for my brother’s presence in my life, and for each day I get to stay on the planet.

Episode 6: A Demonstration of the Creative Process

This episode invites you start integrating creativity into your daily life. To do this you’ll have to learn to relate with your inner critic. To know the unconscious mind, Sigmond Freud argued, we need to be better observers of our thoughts. We live in an age where self-exploration is ironically suppressed. Its ironic because we are so isolated! All the distractions keep the mind’s attention on something other than itself. But we can explore ourselves through the creative process; we just have to be willing to get out of routines and habits of mind, even for a brief period. We could look abnormal, for example, in scribbling down a poem in the car in a convenience store parking lot. But it’s healthy to be a little abnormal. Too much normalizing pressure imprisons the soul.

Episode 5: Integrating Creativity into Daily Life

In this course I interview a friend who is a teacher and single mother and has experienced first hand the empowering effects of accessing creativity. We discuss overcoming vulnerability and fear in her experience of divorce, by taking risks to try new creative activities that have in turn empowered her to overcome challenges in other areas of her life. For years, my friend felt numb to life, and shut herself off from music and art. Then she hit bottom, so to speak, and opened up to interpretive dance and music. This opening up transformed her, and gave her confidence to grow in her career and relationships. Therapists have shown creativity can heal those living with depression based on changed circumstances (such as a loss of job or onset of disease) because it empowers them to do something despite the new situation. I hope you are starting to feel empowered through this course!

Episode 4: Creativity and Empowerment

In this episode, we look at the commonly shared struggle of grief and the role that observation and creativity play in helping us through the grief process. Here I share about the process of writing a poem to better understand death. Oddly (or intuitively…), this poem was written just a few months before my brother died suddenly. The poem takes me out of my perspective and helps me understand the more general human perspective of loss. After the poem a suggested activity is offered. For the activity I ask listeners to write a poem that helps with their grief, but does so indirectly and abstractly.

Episode 3: Poetry and Grief

This episode looks at how artists think about the role of mindfulness in the creative process. Researchers have found artists actually prefer to go between mindful and mind-wandering states in their creative process, in the sense that they are keen observers one moment and absent-minded imaginators the next. Mindfulness is commonly defined as awareness of the present moment with acceptance. Its purpose, according to Buddhists and many therapists, is to understand the patterns of thinking that cause suffering. Creativity, on the other hand, is a way of making meaning out incomprehensible suffering in life. With mindfulness we see where we get stuck in our minds, and with creativity we reflect on life. The two come together for an empowering discernment process.

Episode 2: Connecting Mindfulness and Creativity

What role does creativity play in your life? What creative medium would you like to explore more? This episode outlines the rest of this course and shares my personal experience with creativity as doorway into mindfulness and healing. As a recovering alcoholic, I’ve had to step back from my imagined trajectory in life to look at the reasons the drove me to escape life. In this episode I share my experience in early recovery, and the role of songwriting in healing pains that no amount of analysis can reconcile. To that point, creativity is about finding joy in the present, and in making meaning and tapestry out of the little details we observe throughout the day.

Episode 1: Creative expression and personal growth

I write music and poetry to connect with a higher power and explore all the colors in the human experience.

Integrating Creativity into your Life